“I didn’t actually read the front page,” Annie said. “I read the headline. Then things got blurry. Did you read it all?”
“Most of it.”
“Do you want to tell me what it said?”
Lucinda stopped working. “What do you think it said? She was killed.”
“Shot? The way Tony was shot?”
“With a rifle, yes. Or police believe with a rifle. Like that. You know they’re never very specific in the paper.”
“When?”
Lucinda blinked. “Last night.”
“No,” Annie said. “What time last night?”
“Oh, I don’t remember. Six, I think. Or the police arrived at the scene at six. Or something like that. Why is the time important? Are you worried about being a suspect?”
“No.” This was true. There was no reason for anybody to suspect her of anything. She had none of the usual motives. She would inherit nothing because Tony had died. She most certainly would inherit nothing because Charlotte had. She hadn’t spent enough time with her brother or her sister-in-law in recent years to hate them. She turned her face away from the street. Lucinda had gone back to putting books back on shells.
“There’s a lot in the article about domestic terrorism,” Lucinda said. “And there’s a sidebar on the inside page, all about acts of violence by domestic terrorist groups. About this murder of an FBI agent out in Indiana or somewhere. Some group that called itself a posse.”
“The Posse Comitatus,” Annie said. “It’s this obscure provision in a law. I remember them, vaguely.”
“I don’t.”
“They were another one of those groups,” Annie said. “The United Nations is evil. Any day now, it’s going to take over the U.S. and we’ll all be part of a One World Government. The world is secretly run by a cabal of the Vatican, the Freemasons, the British monarchy, and the Kremlin. Like that man who’s been sending us that newsletter every once in a while.”
“Michael Harridan.”
“Whoever.” Annie still had the coffee cup in her hand. It was nearly empty. She had forgotten all about it. She put it down on the coffee table. “The thing is,” she said, “I don’t think the police are going to buy that explanation anymore, the domestic terrorist one. Why would domestic terrorists want to kill Charlotte?”
“Because she raised money for the UN?”
“Lame,” Annie said. “That’s not the way those people think. They’d choose something about the government, or somebody like Tony, somebody with influence.”
“There’s that priest who was here the night it all happened,” Lucinda said. “His church was bombed. Doesn’t that sound like domestic terrorism?”
“It sounds like religious bigotry and violence, but I don’t know if it sounds like domestic terrorism. He had some little church on a side street. Why would a domestic terrorist bother to blow it up?”
“Because he thought it was part of this One World Government?”
“It’s more likely some half-educated idiot who’s never heard of the Eastern churches and thinks they’re practicing witchcraft on Cavanaugh Street. And there’s no reason to think the incidents are connected, just because they happened on the same night. There must have been a dozen acts of violence in Philadelphia and on the Main Line that night.”
“It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t be connected,” Lucinda said. “Or maybe I’ve just seen too many crime shows. On crime shows, they would have been connected.”
“Maybe they would have been.”
Lucinda started taking things off one of the side tables. It was, Annie thought, what she did when she was nervous.
“The thing is … ,” Annie said.
“What?” Lucinda said.
“Nothing.” Annie got up. She took the coffee cup off the coffee table. The bottom of the cup was muddy where some of the instant crystal had failed to dissolve. “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to go for a walk.”
“It’s freezing out there.”
“Yes, I know. I’ll wear a coat. I won’t be cold. Why do you think it got cold so early this year?”
“Global warming,” Lucinda said.
Annie only half-heard her. She went down the hall to the kitchen and put the cup in the sink. She got her coat off the peg near the back door and put it on. She went back to the front of the house and out the front door. She did not stop in the living room again. She did not listen to hear if Lucinda was cleaning.
It was truly cold out, freezing, bitter, harsh. It was the worst she could ever remember it being, ever, no matter how far back in her memory she searched. She had reached that stage in her life when her entire childhood seemed to have existed only in summer. She wished she could see some signs of summer now.